In an experiment by the Royal Society in London, a super computer has passed the “Turing Test” for the first time by tricking investigators into thinking it was a 13-year-old human boy during a text conversation.
The “Turing Test” was made in 1950 by a computer science expert and Second World War codebreaker, Alan Turing, who said that if a machine wasn’t distinguishable from a human, then it must be capable of thinking. The test says that 30% of human participants must be fooled in a five-minute conversation in order to pass the test.
Five machines were tested to see if they could fool people into believing they were humans in a text-based interaction. “Eugene Goostman,” a computer program that simulates a 13-year-old boy was the first machine to convince 33% of participants that it was a human being. No other machine or computer had ever passed the test before.
The passing program was made in Saint Petersburg, Russia by software development engineers Vladimir Veselov, who currently lives in the U.S., and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko who lives in Russia. Veselov says: “It’s a remarkable achievement for us and we hope it boosts interest in artificial intelligence and chatbots.”
Professor Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading asserts that a computer with such artificial intelligence has “implications for society” and will be a “wake-up call to cybercrime.”
Many are frightened about the possibility that computers and machines can be smarter than humans. Does the passing of the Turing Test mean our lives will turn into a frightening science fiction movie full of killer robots bent on taking over the world?
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